Welcome to PhysicsOverflow public $\beta$ !

The purpose of the public beta is mainly to do with the reviews section - the number of reviews is still very small, and submission re-categorisation is still underway. Local hosting of submissions will also be eventually achieved.

It is to be noted that the current distribution of topics reflects the current user expertise, rather than the ultimately intended figures.

Despite the word "beta" used for this phase, PhysicsOverflow will not shut itself down for low traffic figures.

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On a related note, I created a Google Plus page for PhysicsOverflow a few hours ago: PhysicsOverflow-plus.

The purpose, as stated, is to:

A new Google Plus page for PhysicsOverflow, intended to be a place where great Physics questions on PhysicsOverflow can be posted, and where people can discuss PhysicsOverflow in a place besides meta, i.e. a less polished feature request could be more suitable here than on meta. ﻿

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Wait for the "Reviews" section

Update: The reviews section has been released!

The "Reviews" section is for discussing physics journal papers, arxiv papers, papers in conference proceedings, conference talks, important seminars, and so on. It is not launched yet; however, when it is finally launched, that will be when Physics Overflow leaves it's public beta.

Here's what's planned so far for the "Reviews" category:

All physics papers will be imported from the ArXiV by a bot through the OAI-PMH of ArXiV. What will appear here on Physics Overflow is a just a link to the paper.

Papers or other material can be imported manually through a plugin or maybe directly asking a question in the "Reviews" section. Again, what will appear here is simply a link to the paper or material.

Users with editing priviledges can edit the post (others can suggest edits) to summarise the findings of the paper.

There will be a terminology change from Question to Submission.

There will be a terminology change from Answer to Review.

Users can write referee reports about the accuracy of the paper by writing a review.

Users can suggest papers to cite, or point out papers that have done similar work in the comments (no terminology change for this one).

Users can ask questions about the paper in the comments.

There will be two voting criteria; originality and accuracy for voting on the submission, but voting on the reviews will be the same.

When an author comes here to defend the work, then he would be able to claim authorship for the paper through a thread "Paper Authorship Claims", after which an administrator can change the author of the post to this author.

Since there can be multiple authors for a paper, in the new type of questions (submissions), we will have not only two voting criteria but possibility for multiple authors to a question who can edit it freely and gain the complete reputation (i.e. the reputation is not divided among them, but each gets the full reputation, because another author helping to defend must not reduce the other's reputation) for the paper.

Since there are two voting criteria for submissions, there will be an additional score displayed simply for display purposes, calculated by \(y= \mathfrak{S} \exp\left( \sqrt[3]{\frac{\mathfrak{\times}}{5}} \right)\) where \(y\) is the display score, \(\mathfrak{S}\) is the accuracy score and \(\mathfrak{\times} \) is the originality score as voted by the voters. The rep gain by each author is \(x=5y\)

People can advertise certain submissions using a small fee of around 5 to 10 dollars which will pay expenses such as our hosting fees, and if polarkernel is fine with it, paying him some money for his dedicated help. As we are not a for-profit, we will not use this money for anything else.

The following is not yet planned, but we may have a vague idea about it:

Once the reviews section is stable, we could think of locally hosting contributions, if it does not take up too much space and become expensive.

We could even think of locally editing contributions having a LaTeX editor, with our own class file and everything, just for the reviews section so that the TeX file is saved and a PDF file is generated for viewing.

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Help Moderate Physics Overflow

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